Skepticism

EVENTS

I get email: explosive beginnings

I still do get lots of letters from creationists. Their general tone is usually one of smugness: they’ve got a “gotcha” question they can’t wait to unload on an evilutionist.

dear prof pz myers

can an explosion(big bang)+time= a car?

yours

א ב

Why do you ask a yes/no question about something as complex as the origin of the universe? I can tell from how you chose to ask this question that you aren’t actually interested in the answer, but only want a binary response in which you can either get a “no,” in which case you’ll preen and claim you’ve got me to agree that natural causes are impossible, or you’ll get a “yes,” in which case you’ll fall back on your ignorant intuition and tell me that that is impossible. You aren’t sincere, and you aren’t curious, and you are not an honest seeker after the truth.

Your question is also badly formed; I can’t answer yes or no because it’s phrased in such a way as to reveal your false assumptions. You are equating your colloquial understanding of an explosion to a cosmological event, the Big Bang, and also making an implied demand for a complete causal chain covering a period of 13.8 billion years. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think, that you feel you can dash off a thoughtless question and expect a persuasive answer on a difficult topic?

It’s a commonplace cliche that a teacher will tell a class that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. The teacher is lying. I’ve run across many stupid questions, and you, sir, have written one. It’s not even amazingly stupid or creatively stupid or newly stupid; it’s mundanely stupid. It’s the stupidity of a parrot squawking what, to it, are nonsense syllables, and expecting a cracker for its effort. Further, it’s not a parrot repeating fragments of the speech of great philosophers or scientists, but a parrot fed on nothing but an aural diet of the mumblings of benighted fools.

As for the meat of your question, the cosmological expansion of the universe in the first instant of its beginning was something a little more profound and substantial than an “explosion”. The phrase “Big Bang” is shorthand, a metaphor, for a process that is seen in a rich data set of observations and that can be encapsulated in the language of physics and math. You’re clearly a religious person: ask your rabbi about “metaphors”. They’re used even in your holy books, and you’ll find yourself led to even more ridiculous conclusions about the nature of the universe if you follow every one of them strictly literally.

But if we generalize your question and ask whether explosions can lead to greater complexity and even greater organization, the answer is yes. A better example of such a phenomenon that better fits your casual understanding of the meaning of the word “explosion” is the aftermath of supernovae. The reactions that occur in the hearts of stars are part of a process called nucleosynthesis, in which smaller atoms are fused (it’s why these are called fusion reactions) to produce larger atoms; from a starting point of hydrogen stars build up larger atoms, like carbon and iron. And then at the end of their lifetime, the stars literally explode, dispersing those large elements in vast clouds that condense under the influence of gravity to form new stars and planets.

So yes, the iron in your car was forged in a star and scattered to our planet in an explosion. The carbon of which automotive engineers and factory workers are made was also assembled in a star that exploded.

The second term in your equation, time, is also an attempt to trivialize a phenomenon. Yes, “time” built us. But by time, of course, more sensible people mean a complex set of historical interactions and natural processes that were necessary for change to occur. Why do you regard it as something insignificant? We could say that you were the product of a messy eruption of fluids and cells from your mother and father plus “time”…but do you consider your embryonic development, your growth as a child and adolescent, your education (which, I’m sorry to say, was actually where you were shortchanged), your experiences and years of thoughts (shallow as they were), are simply reducible to a four-letter word?

Can ovulation/ejaculation+time=you?

Only in the most trivial and unhelpful sense. Just like your question.

That was a pleasure to read. He also doesn’t seem to understand causality. A car is not s direct product of the Big Bang. It’s made by humans, who are a product of evolution, which is process where simple life created by abiogenesis became more complex; abiogenesis is the process whereby inert chemistry became living organisms, and that chemistry was a product of internal nuclear fusion within stars the products of which are then spread throughout the solar system by supernovae, and those stars are a product of material condensing over time to form definite bodies of material which was previously spread fairly evenly throughout the universe by the Big Bang. It’s a stupid question, though it is answerable.

The initials are Aleph Bet. Those could be real initials, but they’re way overfrequently used as a placeholder. My guess would be fundamentalist Christian who talks about “Yeshua” and can’t read a word of Hebrew.

My feeling is that this idiot wasn’t asking literally if a car could be produced by time and the big bang; I think he was groping for a variation on the Paley’s Watchmaker argument, that order (or design) implies an organizer (or designer). The problem I have with the “Watchmaker Analogy” (and most variants) is this- if you see a watch lying in the desert, you know it’s an artifact, a created thing, because of the implicit contrast between it and it’s natural surroundings. But, with a sample size of exactly and only one universe (including all the life within it), what do you contrast that with in order to conclude that it’s an obviously created artifact? You can’t deduce “creation” by comparison when there’s nothing else to compare it to.

Of course the answer is yes! But the cthulhu is in the details, as any chemistry professor (like me) would point out. You don’t just have to know the reactants and the products – the important part is the *mechanism*! A more important (and fun, from the perspective of science) question is “HOW can explostion + time = car?” But then, I don’t expect the questioner to understand the difference…

The short time I attended a church that taught these smug questions, I actually would try to answer with the meager education I’d been given. Even I could work out that this question is too simple, at an age where I was learning very little good science. I don’t understand the appeal of these questions to others, even now. Is it that the need to feel important and hand-picked for life makes it too difficult to see how mechanisms of life really work? Do people fear so greatly that they aren’t at all important to some giant, invisible god that they will accept the idea that going from the big bang (or great expansion, as someone in my science classes somewhere along the way called it) into the universe we live in, the eventual forming of life on this planet that gave rise to evolution, the creatures then made cars, must seem terrifying?

I am disappointed to see that people still fall back on these questions. My time in that church was 23 years ago. It just won’t die out…

explosion(big bang)+time= a car
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Add a little more time and you have a car that breaks down as the warrantry runs out.
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Add more time + wet, rainy climate and you get a rusty car that breaks down in the rain miles from anywhere.

Yeah, students do sometimes ask totally stupid questions. However, it’s usually not a good idea to reveal too quickly how stupid it is. I’ll admit, though, that I didn’t give too much slack to the algebra student who expressed disinterest in the lesson on logarithms because I used an example involving carbon-14 dating, and that is apparently of the devil.

@thisisaturingtest(13): I’ve been thinking some about the watch argument. If you find a watch lying in the desert, as you said, you know it’s an argument, because you’re familiar with the local environment (though since the whole point of the argument is to point out that the desert is also designed, this approach seems counterproductive).

But if you ignore the creationist’s point, it actually becomes quite interesting. If you find a watch, you know it’s an artifact, but do you really know that it’s “created”? After all, it’s not as if some watchmaker suddenly built a watch ex nihilo from raw materials, with no prior watchmaking tradition.

In fact, watches evolve in the same way organisms do. Information for constructing sundials propagated according to viability (in this case, usefulness to humans), and so some forms of sundials progressed, while other lines died out. Add time, and you get speciation; sundials become astrolabes and large mechanical clocks, which through natural selection and time eventually evolve into that delicate little Swiss watch you’ve just picked up.

A watch is no more or less created than a plant; it’s just that the information format (a mechanical design) and interpretation mechanism (human agency) are different. A watch (or a car) isn’t a Created Thing; it’s a phenotype.

I know it’s just the Comic Sans talking, but I read the original question as being about the “big bong.”

As for tired arguments, I attended a Sunday school class for adults last weekend at which they posed the question “Big Bang or Big God,” in hopes of finding what new arguments they were coming up with.

My Sweet Xenu, they’re still citing Henry Morris. They’re still arguing that Biblical study says the “days of creation” must be literal 24-hour days, even on the four days before the Sun was created. If anything, they’re getting stupider as the footnotes degrade.

What’s with the ‘car’ thing? Why didn’t he just say ‘can an explosion(big bang)+time= a person?’, especially as these morons always like to bang on about how a single human cell is more ‘complex’ than any man-made thing ever made ever?

It’s like they’ve got so wrapped up in their ‘explosion in a junkyard’ bullshit that they automatically reach for the crappy metaphor even when simply describing the actual thing they’re talking about would make the same point more effectively (that is, in a fractionally less idiotic way, which would seem to be the best they can hope for).

When you’re faced with people who try to convince you of the alleged useless futility of science with a rhetorical question like “how can anyone survive an explosion as big as (the Big Bang)?” what choices do you have other than to respond with an insincere sincere smile, or rend flesh with the most cruelest of sarcasm?

Of course the watch question also underscores how technological innovation differs from evolution. Watches can be made from different materials, they can borrow technology from other, unrelated machines, they can go back to old designs, and so on.

I think this particular brand of “ohs I gots you mean old scienamatists” probably originally began life as a creationist reading this comic and then several layers of telephone, preaching the perniciousness of science, and “time” we got this weak attempt at an argument.

Which would once again point to my pet theory that wingnuts and other conspiracy theorists don’t understand sarcasm, comedy, or satire.

My feeling is that this idiot wasn’t asking literally if a car could be produced by time and the big bang; I think he was groping for a variation on the Paley’s Watchmaker argument, that order (or design) implies an organizer (or designer). The problem I have with the “Watchmaker Analogy” (and most variants) is this- if you see a watch lying in the desert, you know it’s an artifact, a created thing, because of the implicit contrast between it and it’s natural surroundings. But, with a sample size of exactly and only one universe (including all the life within it), what do you contrast that with in order to conclude that it’s an obviously created artifact? You can’t deduce “creation” by comparison when there’s nothing else to compare it to.

The watch is part of the universe. Things often change form in the universe. Some times quickly, sometimes slowly.

@what a maroon #35
Of course watches, and possibly computer viruses, may evolve via Lamarkian rather than Darwinian evolution since they are not restricted by the need for DNA replication and modification via sexual reproduction.

Of course the watch question also underscores how technological innovation differs from evolution. Watches can be made from different materials, they can borrow technology from other, unrelated machines, they can go back to old designs, and so on.

And there’s no watch equivalent to the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve.

That’s why I like to reframe the watch question as the sundial question. Those are like laryngeal nerves. All sundials need the sun to work. You can’t change that about them. They also could occur naturally. You really could stumble upon some formation that works as a sundial, such as a tree trunk with some stones around it, without wondering who created it (unless you are one of those people who are keen to find god in frozen waterfalls!).

Actually, that was part of Darwin’s Big Ideas. Darwin knew that humans could breed a pigeon with certain properties by picking parent pigeons with those traits — that domestic animals changed as humans selected for different traits (or segregated them into breeds). Farmers had known that for millennia. Darwin’s two big ideas were:

1. Even without humans, pigeons would change (or not change) because pigeons better able to feed themselves and attract mates would have more chicks than those that couldn’t.

2. That a whole lot of time and generations could do things that were hard to imagine until you saw it all laid out for you.

To use your watch analogy, my digital watch (which is actually a part of my iPod) and the clockwork* at the local observatory to keep the telescope staring at one place have the same common ancestor, but without knowing the history of timekeeping someone might not realize their common links. After all, one is gears and one is solid-state electronics.

* Literally; the telescope is an antique and the drive is powered by weights raised by a hand crank. If the power goes out, the telescope still works (the dome on the other hand, not so much…)

Yeah, good point. I think that’s what creationists miss, a lot of times — that evolution actually isn’t random. Nor, given the physical laws, is the formation of the present universe from the initial chaos of the big bang. So a better “equation” would be chaos+energy+order+time = everything.

I find it really hard to just answer questions like that from people like the questioner would appear to be.
I do not know where to start because I do not know what they mean or what they know.
The simplest answer would be to point to a car and say yes there is a car there. Then since that won’t satisfy them to then ask them questions about what they know. Either way it is a usually useless and pointless exercise.
uncle frogy

It’s hard to tell if those are supposed to be initials or just the name Avi. Importing hebrew characters into programs designed for english-language writers can be difficult (kerning, for instance, is just wholly ridiculous in many hebrew fonts rendered in gmail, etc.).

The only reason that there mat be no stupid questions is that stupid is a limit.

I do like the design question when they use mt rushmore as the example because according to them all the rocks are also designed…so there is no undesigned background to compare to.

So as was mentioned above if you find a watch in the desert you should not be able to discern it from the surroundings as being created all of that other stuff should look just as created…you know, but it doesn’t.

Funny how it’s always okay to apply intuition to the question of origins when discussing the Big Bang and evolution (Explosions don’t make cars! Tornadoes don’t make 747s!) but never when discussing giant invisible sorcerers chanting spells to create complex objects out of nothing.

Everyone knows the big bang isn’t the direct ancestor of the motor car, it’s lots of little bangs.
(Oh god, give me a hammer, so I can make this fucking fender fit.)
Yes, children, it’s the Oh God of the Panel Gaps.

I think PZ nailed this twit in the first paragraph – these people are not curious, they have all the answers in their little black book and there’s nothing more they need to know. If there’s one thing that typifies the commentators here it’s a fascination with the world and a desire to understand how it works but this person doesn’t; he just knows if he turns the key his car will go (or not).

The Big Bang was not an explosion. I suppose you could argue that it was as much an explosion as “The Cambrian Explosion” or a temper tantrum, but use of the term here indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of the actual phenomenon.

This reminds me of an old creationist website (I saw it about eight or so years ago) that claimed to have “disproved” evolution because the page owner had kept a pile of Legos under a lamp for a couple of years and they never became a house (or something).

Crip Dyke, fair point. There is a character of whitespace in there, which “shouldn’t” happen just because of font weirdness. But I guess I know better than to make confident claims about what computers won’t do re internationalization.

The reactions that occur in the hearts of stars are part of a process called nucleosynthesis, in which smaller atoms are fused (it’s why these are called fusion reactions) to produce larger atoms; from a starting point of hydrogen stars build up larger atoms, like carbon and iron. And then at the end of their lifetime, the stars literally explode, dispersing those large elements in vast clouds that condense under the influence of gravity to form new stars and planets.

By in large totally true and well done for a biologist. I have to fix the one tiny detail that isn’t quite right… somebody else may have noticed it already.

Normal fusion can only produce elements up to iron. Because iron can’t be fused by normal processes into heavier elements, the loss of thermal energy which was generated to that point by fusion results in an imbalance with the gravitational forces holding the star together. Upon reaching a critical amount of iron, fusion ceases within the star and the star begins to implode on itself. When the weight of the star rebounds off the core, the resulting pressures form all the elemental nuclei heavier than iron. Heavier nuclei are literally formed during the supernova explosion.

I only mention it because this detail further bolsters your argument: that the explosion itself can be creative.

Well, iron can be fused into heavier elements, but for everything below iron the energy you put in to make them fuse together is less than the energy you get out when the fusion happens. For iron and above you need more energy in to start with, probably a bit more pressure, and you get less energy out than what you put in. The end result is pretty much what you said though vigen111. Core stops radiating out energy at as high a rate, leading to the imbalance of forces. Ending with a big kaboom, elements of various atomic numbers spread across the cosmic neighbourhood, and depending on the mass of the initial star, and what the mass of the remnant core is, a little neutron star/pulsar or black hole.

I like to turn the Paley watchmaker argument on its head by asking the thought-experimenter to travel to a far-distant planet, where there are a wide variety of self-powered creature/devices, many of which work on fundamentally different principles from one another, and ask oneself: which of these things were consciously designed in their present form, which have evolved from prior forms, and of the latter, which could plausibly have evolved from very simple ancestors?

Such a planet could stump xenobiologists for centuries, and some answers would remain unknowable until new discoveries illuminated them. A wheeled organism might seem to be a consciously designed creation right up until clear transitional forms from non-wheeled ancestors turned up in the fossil record. Another line of organisms may seem like completely natural evolution, until you dug up some equivalent of a DVD chronicling those organisms’ origin in an experiment in artificial abiogenesis. And so on.

And the key point is that you could never be completely certain about any of it. But given enough research and enough data (assuming enough data still exists), you could eventually construct a sort of genealogy of design and evolution between the various kingdoms of “life”.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, as much as they might like to, the cdesign proponentsists simply do not have the smoking gun to rule out natural abiogenesis as the origin of life on Earth, nor to rule out environment-driven evolution as the origin of species. There will always be gaps, but the God that still fits in those gaps is very small indeed, and a far cry from the busy fellow described in Genesis chapter 1.